


so lay down (the threat is real)

by nagia



Series: O Tower Not Ivory [6]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Accidental Messianic Figure Regrets All Of Her Choices, Dubious or impaired consent, F/M, Mercy Killing, Redcliffe Dark Future, Stalkery Obsessive Fanatic, Stalkery Obsessive Fanatic Cullen, Worship, Zealot Cullen Regrets Nothing (He Is So Far Past Regret)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 12:05:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15436680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagia/pseuds/nagia
Summary: Cullen joins in the infiltration of Redcliffe Castle.  Itdoesn'tmake anything better.





	so lay down (the threat is real)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [worthy any price](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/401250) by anonymous. 



> My birthday was last week, but things have been crazy. My usual "birthday amnesty" applies here: this is what I have so far. This fic may never be bigger than it is right now (though I do hope to write more), but hopefully I've laid the groundwork for just how dark and horrible this fic would be, if I continued it.
> 
> I've played fast and loose with the layout of Redcliffe Castle. Mostly I'm borrowing from Inquisition's version of Redcliffe, but there are a few nods here and there to either the Origins version or to how such a castle would likely work, if it had been designed as a useful structure and not a video game level.
> 
> Many thanks to Leviathanmirror, Dog Star, and the other lovely people in #rabbitchat. They're great and I love them, and they _seriously_ need to find straps I can't chew through.

This change, he won't contain,  
Slip away, to clear your mind.  
When asked, who made it show,  
The truth, he gives in to most.  
So lay down, the threat is real,  
When his sight goes red again.  
— Chevelle, "The Red"

* * *

The make-shift war room in the back of the Haven Chantry is smoky and dark, every bit as enclosed as the cells Heloise Trevelyan has only recently been freed from. There are at least plenty of candles, filling the room with the scent of warm tallow and their flickering firefly light. They create a sense of warmth and a kind of low, whispery haze that shines off everything, from Josephine's cloth-of-gold blouse to the tapestries on the walls.

Commander Cullen, on the other hand, is a stark figure, hardened and too real, despite the light that limns him. He leans forward, decisive, and snaps to the assembled council, "Tactically, I can't support it. If we should lose the Herald, all is lost, regardless. That mark is the only way we've found to close the Rifts."

"Cullen, I have volunteered to go with her as her attaché." Cassandra folds her arms and stares at him. He looks right back, and both their jaws twitch in stubborn defiance of the other's logic.

Leliana watches all of this and raises an eyebrow. "Do you doubt Cassandra's abilities?" She sounds, as she almost always does, faintly amused by the people around her. Then again, the Seeker has literally walked into the eye of a Blight and come out not only victorious but whole, or mostly so. As awful and world-shaking as all this is, she's played for stakes almost as high.

Cullen, for his part, looks taken aback. He shakes his head, vehement, and then says, "No. Of course not. But as Right Hand of the Divine, she's also too useful to the Inquisition to risk."

"You're just angling to get me to court the Templars again, aren't you?" It's a sharp jab, Hel knows, and she sees it land in the way his mouth twists down for a moment. It makes his scar stand out, livid even against his pale flesh.

She's pricked his pride, both as the Commander of the Inquisition's Forces and as a man who no longer agrees with his Order's actions. He draws in a deep breath, then lets it out through his nose in one short, aggravated burst.

"Very well," he tells them all. "I'll go. I can thwart any magic these _Venatori_ may cast, I'm little enough known, and should I not return… there are already contingencies."

He says the word _Venatori_ both as if it's completely unfamiliar and as if it tastes foul in his mouth.

"That's all very well," Hel says, "but I'm supposed to go alone. I don't even know how I was going to justify Cassandra being there."

They're all quiet a minute, thinking. Cullen's brow knits, while Josephine fidgets with her quill. Cassandra's leather armor creaks, very faintly, as she shifts on her feet. Not even Leliana is still; she leans forward and looks at the map, her fingers flexing as she grips the table.

Eventually, Leliana says, "It would be foolish for the Inquisition to negotiate for mage support without knowing just what it needed."

That gets Cullen's attention. It draws all their attention, actually. Into their waiting silence, Leliana adds, "Cullen was a templar who spent most of his adult life in the Circle. We already know him to have come to his own understanding of the Breach, and he must have heard basic magical theory." 

Cassandra stirs. She leans forward, animated, eyes alight and mouth curved in fierce satisfaction. "Yes, of course. If the Herald takes Solas, as well, then she can have two experts on the Breach to accompany her. Perfect to sit down to a negotiation."

Josephine actually puts her pen down as she adds, "Yes, yes. And one final person to ward her… call them a diplomatic attaché. This could actually work, and quite well!"

"Blackwall," Hel says, immediately. "Varric and Vivienne are too well-known, and he has some experience dealing with these Warden treaties." She wishes that she could bring Sera — that irreverent attitude would go a long way toward making small talk with Alexius more bearable, or at least full of bees — but she dares not even use Sera's name in the same conversation as 'diplomat.'

"So it's decided, then? This is our plan? Lord Pavus will accompany Leliana's spies through the hidden entrance, while you and a few disguised companions draw the magister's attention away?" Cassandra is looking at Heloise, like Heloise is the one with the final say. Then again, she supposes she is. The war council has bickered over so much, so often, that she's been at least a tie breaker for some weeks now.

"It would seem so," Cullen says. His expression turns sour as something he must not like occurs to him, but he says nothing of the matter.

"It's a good plan." Leliana's mouth curls into her sweet, round smile.

* * *

A good plan, right. A good plan that didn't take into account her own nature. The sight of Commander Cullen in the full templar plate, from cuirass to skirt and sash, gives her a sudden pause. She finds she can't move, even as the wind plays with the snow around her, tossing flakes and ice shards through the air. People pass her by, and yet she remains in the grip of some visceral, bone-deep — 

Discomfort. Not fear. Even were Commander Cullen the sort of templar prone to abusing mages — and she does not think he is himself, no matter what he permitted within the Kirkwall Circle, before it fell — what can he do to her that will be worse than what she's already faced? She's been Silenced before, been struck, been tossed into the lowest cells of the Carracks at high tide, when the diseased waters flowed in. 

She takes in a deep breath and steps forward. "Ser Cullen," she says, and she startles herself at how frosty her tone is. She hadn't meant to sound so.

But Commander Cullen just inclines his head. He looks a little sad, brow creasing and mouth drawing down, but the expression passes quickly.

"Herald," he replies. "We're ready to leave at your word."

She draws in another deep breath, then makes for the Fereldan Forder that one of Dennet's stable hands saddled for her. "Let's go," she tells the assembled men.

Dorian gives her a heartening smile. That smile and the strange expression on Cullen's face are the last thing she sees before she guides her mount eastward, toward the Hinterlands.

* * *

Turns out, it was actually a terrible plan. The relative terribleness of the plan has nothing to do with its crafting. It's nobody's _fault_ , really. In fact, at the outset, it all goes quite well. She shows herself in Redcliffe, greets one of Alexius's flunkies, and then follows him across a bridge made of _ice_ to the castle proper. She has to marvel at it. She's crafted walls, of course, and Maker knows she could draw the traceries of an ice glyph in her sleep. One of her first spells was ice.

She's still never thought to use it to make a bridge. And the bridge is beautiful: parts of it pale blue, parts of it frothy white, like the wavecaps in a harbor captured at their peaks. All of it motionless and glittering, and surprisingly strong. Solas trails his fingers along it, either marveling or analyzing.

Also slippery. Cullen and Blackwall are wearing greaves, and they both very nearly fall right off the bridge. Thankfully, Alexius's lackey doesn't seem to notice, and they follow him through a building cut from dark stone. It might have been inviting, once, with its antler-and-dog-carving decor. It might have had portraits, or tapestries, or candles with their homey warmth.

Instead, Alexius has lit the place mostly with veilfire, and it casts everything in a cold green light that sets her teeth on edge. With every corner, she prepares herself to hear the shattered glass and screaming of a rift opening. It surely must be unnerving to Cullen and Blackwall, but when she turns to look, both are wearing grim, stoic expressions that give no clue as to their thoughts.

No, matters don't go straight to the warm place behind Maferath's balls until they reach the Great Hall. It swelters with the heat from torches and charcoal braziers, in addition to the blaze set in the vast fireplace. Hel shakes her head, running her fingers through her hair to try and disentangle it, and ignores the way she feels vaguely faint at all the smoke she smells.

One of the lackeys inside the castle objects to Heloise arriving with an armed guard. Heloise draws on all the nobles she saw in Ostwick, all she knows of Orlais and how greatly it values cleverness over aught else, and every story of the Champion of Kirkwall she ever read. She lifts her chin, locks eyes with the lackey — his are a weak, watery blue, and even though his hair is tawny and his cheeks are round, he looks mouse-like to her. She holds his gaze a beat and then says, "You wouldn't deprive me of my attache, would you?"

Then, still holding their gazes locked, keeping eye contact by main force of will, she smiles. It's too bright, too well timed, to be aught but deliberate. They both know her armed escort is not a trio of diplomatic assistants, and they both know the other knows it. The only question is: is the lackey willing to risk her walking?

He isn't. Quite. He stutters, stepping backward, and Felix saves the day. He interjects himself smoothly with a courtly half bow, sweeping a hand to indicate the rug before the magister's dais.

"The Herald has brought such interesting guests," he says. His tone is relaxed, dutiful, not the drawling, almost smarmy amusement his father wears. "I'm sure Father will be very interested to hear what they have to say."

Heloise flashes him a real smile as she passes. It's quick, relieved, and his gaze turns somber as he nods to her. She hears him follow them, light footsteps almost silent on the thick carpets.

"Magister Alexius," she says, once they've all assembled before him, and her voice comes out blessedly cool.

"Herald," Alexius replies. He reclines on what surely must be the arl's throne, and tilts his head back to regard her. "You are here to negotiate for use of my mages?"

"I am." She inclines her head, not willing to cede even a little bit of ground to this man.

"What do you offer in exchange for their services?" He tips his head to the side, and she's reminded of a bird. It doesn't help that his nose is sharp and his eyes are alert. It gives him the look of one of the Free Marches' raptors.

Hel smiles, long and slow and real, savoring this moment. She didn't have many opportunities for coups like this in Ostwick, but they were always sweet. "Nothing at all," she says.

It takes almost the entire room aback. That she has dared speak so to a magister. That she did not, in fact, come to parlay, but to — 

"What?" He asks.

"You heard me. I need them. I'm taking them. And I'm not offering you anything for them. Fixing that hole in the sky should be reward enough, I think."

And as Alexius splutters, his son, Felix, steps forward once more. "She knows everything, Father."

What follows is the deaths of a dozen Venatori, a lot of shouting, Dorian letting loose with magic, some sort of bizarre swirling vortex, and Cullen's face as he tries to purge whatever magic is at work —

* * *

— and fails.

When the world starts to make sense again, she finds herself waist-deep in scummy, fetid water, and locked in some sort of dark cell. The bars look rusty, and the light in the room is strangely red. At least it isn't green, she thinks. She wades forward, looking to Dorian for answers, but before he can say anything, two men in clanking armor rush into the room. The cell's gate slams closed behind them, and the sound echoes off the stone walls and the water.

"Blood of the Elder One," a man in a beaked helm hisses. "How did you get —"

Heloise doesn't let him finish. She pulls out the oldest magic trick she ever tried, the spell that got her sent to the Carracks: she freezes the water they're all standing in. After that, it's a simple matter of layering spell atop spell. Winter's Grasp. Chain Lightning. And Dorian adds his own magic to the mix: fire spells, mostly.

When it's over, Dorian just stares at their surroundings. He turns his gaze on the red in the walls, before finally saying — in a tone that sounds far too casual to be real, "Displacement within the castle. Interesting. I wonder if my mental state as I interrupted the spell has anything to do with the change in location."

Hel tries to sidle toward a dry spot, but there are no dry spots. Too many memories of solitary confinement dry out her mouth. For all that this is Redcliffe, probably, the bright shadow of Ostwick has fallen upon her, and too many warnings not to drink from the canals, not to even _touch_ the waters there, echo through her thoughts.

She dismisses it and focuses on what Dorian is saying, even as he turns to peer at the glowing red veins that run through the walls.

"Displacement? That's not possible." Everyone knows that. "Nobody has ever managed teleportation." It's a cardinal rule of magic.

"Nobody's managed time magic before, either." Dorian's mouth curls up. "The Breach has a lot to answer for. And speaking of time magic, I don't think we've been moved solely in space."

"Was that a joke?" He can't be serious. Time and space. Maker help them all. "No, of course it wasn't. There's a giant hole in the sky; why _not_ magical time displacement." Hel steps forward again, this time to inspect the red growth coming from the wall. That it brings her away from the deeper water, into shallows, is a lesser concern.

The air around the stone feels strangely warm. Red lyium, then. "Alright. How do we get back? You helped create this magic; I assume you have some sort of plan?"

"I have a few thoughts, yes." Dorian flashes her a charming smile, though it doesn't reach his eyes, and adds, "They're quite lovely. Like little jewels."

"Right, then. First step: figure out exactly where we are, and how far we've been moved. Then… what, find Alexius?" If Dorian doesn't know how to get them home, then Alexius will have some ideas, and Heloise has no qualms with the thought of beating those ideas out of him.

"Our first step," Dorian says, grimacing as he stoops to search the body of one of the Venatori soldiers, "is to get out of these ghastly cells."

Well, there's that, too.

* * *

"I honestly thought the tacky dog and wolf carvings were as bad as decor could get," Dorian mutters as they slog their way through the half-flooded lower levels of the castle. His boots squelch, and he makes the most hilarious grumpy face every time the squelching noises get too loud. "But this is really not an improvement."

Hel doesn't laugh, though. Instead she asks, "Are you serious?" Some part of her refuses to believe that even a Fereldan arl would be so stereotypically Fereldan, but she did see the dogs by the arl's throne. She wants to doubt, regardless.

"Oh yes. The old escape route leads right through these levels. I suspect the arl thought the lower cells a fine place to store his more unsightly statues. They were at least mostly out of sight."

Hel shakes her head, but she knows Dorian sees her smile. It's kind of him to try to distract her from how much she hates the water that covers her feet and sometimes comes up to her ankles. She looks down and is abruptly thankful for the thick Fereldan boots Leliana had pressed into her hands before her first trip into the Hinterlands.

They're every bit as ugly and shapeless as Leliana had said they were, but they're doing a surprisingly fine job of keeping her feet dry. Fereldans know what they're about when it comes to keeping mud away from their skin, it would seem.

The dungeons are a veritable maze. They wend their way through them, with footsteps echoing off the walls and the floors, and the light stays red-tinged. Eventually, they come to a door that isn't locked, or probably isn't, but that neither of them can open.

"I can try to burn it down," Dorian says. "But I suspect then we'll just have a melted mess to deal with. Some metals don't take cold well."

Heloise strips both gloves, holding them in her teeth, and reaches out. She presses her palms and fingers flat against the metal, and closes her eyes. The magic she uses is more an undirected elemental force than a specific spell, but frost begins to form. She keeps pouring mana into it, insisting _colder_ to a universe that doesn't seem quite so stubborn as usual.

And then, all at once, in a rush and with a screaming, squealing crack, the door not only ices over completely but begins to split. The air around them turns frigid. Dorian heaves his shoulder against one of the halves of the door, grunting, and then they're through.

A familiar voice, with its familiar Orlesian accent, asks, "Who is there? Why have you come here?" The voice is raspy and whisper-soft, as if the speaker can't get quite enough breath to project. A rarity in a mage; they train their voices from childhood.

Grand Enchanter Fiona. So, however far forward they've been flung — and judging by the red lyrium, Hel has no doubt it's the future — the Grand Enchanter is at least still alive.

"It's us. Heloise Trevelyan and… we mean you no harm, anyway," Hel says, sloshing her way into the rest of the room. Chunks of ice float on the water covering the floor.

What she sees when she turns to look into the Grand Enchanter's cell, however, arrests her as thoroughly as the sight of Commander Cullen in templar armor.

"Maker's breath," she says, by reflex, because there is nothing better to say. She follows it up with, "How are you alive?"

Fiona turns her head — and stone makes tiny crackling noises, as if it's _in the veins of her throat_ — and gives her a smile more sad than bitter. Hel doesn't want to look too closely, but she can see with ease that red lyrium has begun to grow out of the Grand Enchanter, thickest around her lower torso, but spiralling up onto her shoulders and branching out like some mad fashion accessory. The lyrium has even fused her to one of the red veins in the wall.

"There is no death," Fiona murmurs. "Only this. Always this. They let us become… and mine our corpses for more." She pauses to draw in a ragged breath, and Hel can hear crackling in her chest. "How have you returned to us?"

"Time magic. It's complicated. Do you know what day it is?"

The smile turns more bitter than sad. "What do days matter?"

"Then what year is it? What season? When _are_ we? How long have I been gone?"

"Autumn, I think." A pause. Fiona tips her head, considering. "Nine… forty-two? Yes." That _yes_ comes out in a quiet, pleased hiss. "Harvestmere. Nine forty-two, Dragon."

Dorian says exactly what she's thinking: "Then he's moved us in time an entire year." He goes on to add, "If we can get that amulet, I may be able to reconstruct the spell. Send us back to the moment we left, provided it doesn't turn us to paste."

That, then, would be the seed of the plan he'd been nursing earlier.

Fiona doesn't even look at him. She keeps her red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes on Hel, and says, "The Elder One is real. Stronger than the Maker. You must go back."

"We'll certainly try. I did mention the possibility of being turned to paste."

Still ignoring Dorian, Fiona draws in an awful-sounding breath. "You're not alone," Fiona tells Hel. "Your spymaster is here, and the Commander walks free. He might help you find her — but don't trust him."

She doesn't know what to make of that. So she draws in a breath of her own, and lets it out, then nods.

"We'll fix this, I promise. We'll make sure this never happens," Hel tells her, because reach though she might for the seeming good humor with which she's met every other problem, she can't find it.

But Fiona's gaze has turned back to the wall, and the red that surely must flood her vision all the time. "Fix _me_ ," she whispers. "End it. I beg you, Herald. Show the mercy Alexius would not."

They say that with the killing cold can come delirium, or perhaps delight. A euphoric sense of warmth and well being. Hel looks at Fiona for a long, long moment, at the twisted thing she's become, at the way her pale veins are such a bright red beneath her vellum-fragile skin. And then she shapes the world anew, and hopes that Fiona finds that warm space before the cold takes her.

She doesn't look at Dorian until they've left the room. She doesn't want to see his reaction, to know what he thinks she should have done. It's no less awful if he agrees than if he doesn't.

"I'm sorry you had to do that," Dorian says, as they leave. He sets the two fragments of the door together and, with a twist of will and the kind of rush of mana that gives her gooseflesh, hews it all together in a gout of flame. The water on the floor turns to wisps of white steam, flecked with pink from the red lyrium it's been tainted with.

* * *

A few rooms later, they hear the chanting. Hel recognizes the timbre of the voice. Though she's never heard him sing, she would recognize that high, brassy tenor anywhere. Bright and clear as the ringing of a Chantry bell.

"Commander Cullen," she says. She and Dorian race toward the voice, the sound of their movements carrying almost as easily as Cullen's chant, and Dorian has to heave hard with his shoulder to get the dungeon door open. Hel follows swift on his heels, all but praying that if Fiona was wrong, if Cullen is in a cell, at least he won't be fused to it.

But Cullen really is free. He even carries his sword still, though there's something awkward about the way that he stands with his back to them, red light flickering over his pale skin, in the center of —

Of what must have been a torture chamber. Hel tries to let her eyes glaze over the bloodstained Chantry robes, the awls and saws, the pokers in the ashes of a fire long burnt out. But there's no one in the room, at least, so Cullen has evidently come in here… for some other purpose? Was he being held here?

"Commander?" She asks.

She sees his shudder, like a horse beset by flies. His whole body shakes, and then he turns. His movements are slow, jerky.

He's abandoned his cuirass, or maybe had it taken from him. Instead, he's down to his jerkin and the usual templar skirt, though it's ragged and blood-stained. Something about the muscles of his shoulders looks wrong, just faintly misshapen, but worst of all is his face. Tiny red nubs dot his forehead, longer above his right eyebrow, and a few darken his cheek and jaw, in some parody of stubble. Eyes that should be golden brown are red, instead, and his right eye has filmed over with some sort of reddish substance.

Maker's breath, is lyrium _growing on his eye_?

Cullen's face twists into an expression that is both rapturous and terrible. His eyes widen — though his right eye doesn't widen as much as the left — and he opens his chapped, too-red mouth in something that might almost be a smile.

"Herald," he says, and, oh, Maker, at least his voice is unchanged. "I have prayed for this day." He takes a step toward her, and either he hasn't seen Dorian or is completely ignoring him, and says, "I am repentant of my sin, Herald. Will you not grant me forgiveness?"

Hel looks to Dorian. He looks back at her, clearly just as confused as she is.

"Cullen," she says, as gently as she dares. "There's nothing to forgive."

His left eye narrows, and his mouth wrenches down, even as he squares his shoulders and clenches his fists. "I failed you," he snaps. "I reached for you, but couldn't pull you back. What greater sin could I have committed?"

"I have so many answers to that question," Dorian says, in what is likely an attempt to inject some sort of levity, some sort of _sanity_ , into this conversation.

It's evidently misguided, because Cullen turns on him. "Silence, maleficar," he hisses, and the room turns heavy, as if Cullen has sucked the air out of it.

It's instinct to draw lightning over her fingers, just to make sure she can still cast. But she can, and when she turns to look at Dorian, he's followed suit and wreathed his hand in golden light. It would seem Cullen hasn't disrupted mana, or laid down a field of Silence.

"I know what you studied. You are half of why the Herald was lost," Cullen snarls at Dorian.

Hel moves to stand between them. Both Cullen and Dorian are taller than she is, so she can't hope to block Dorian from Cullen's sight, but she can at least create a barrier.

It takes Cullen aback. She sees him recoil, sees the hurt that flashes along his face. But then he kneels and bows his head. 

"Forgive me my trespass, Herald," he says.

Of all the things she had expected, a worshipful Commander Cullen at her feet was not one of them. She's got a brand new reason to dislike that damnable title, and she didn't think she needed any more. When she turns and looks to Dorian, his expression is as lost as she feels.

This new, awful world is like taking a gondola through the canals of dual-walled Ostwick and being swept out suddenly to sea. Every change is like a wave crashing over a little wooden boat, and Hel has the distinct feeling of drowning. 

Not knowing what else to do, she rests her fingertips on the top of Cullen's head. She presses down, quickly, just enough to make sure he feels it, make sure he knows she has touched him, and then lifts her hand away.

"I… You are forgiven," she says, formal and stilted. 

Cullen doesn't lift his head, doesn't move, only waits. Though he's shuttered his left eye closed, his right remains partly open, thanks to the crusty red film. He doesn't seem to notice how awkward she is as a figure of worship.

"Rise," she says, at length. "Uh. Rise, and trespass no more."

He surges up, almost smoothly. And yet moving his head seems difficult for him, and the set of his shoulders is still awkward and stiff.

"Is he coming with us?" Dorian asks from behind her. "Personally, I'd like to vote 'no.' I'm not sure he understands the difference between me and actual maleficarum, and I'd rather he not disrupt my magic while I'm trying to save your life."

"Just try and part me from the Herald, maleficar," is Cullen's response, and were she inclined to argue with either of them, she'd have to admit he's proven Dorian's point. His grip on his sword shifts, and Heloise tries to make sure her spine is straight and she's at full height. 

"Nobody's parting anybody from anybody," Hel says, raising her voice just enough to make very certain they both hear her. "Cullen, Dorian is my companion, not a blood mage, and he wants to help fix this. If you repent of your — of your failure, you'll stay civil."

She actually sees Cullen's temper flare. He breathes hard through his nose, and his red eyes glow, especially his right eye. But then he bows his head.

"As you will," he says.

* * *

Cullen turns out to be surprisingly informative, provided Dorian isn't the one asking. At all of Dorian's questions, Cullen just looks his way for a moment and then says nothing. Hel has to repeat it, and then he nods and gives an answer.

It would be maddening, if it didn't distract her so thoroughly from the stagnant water. Though the smell of it fills her nose, though she can feel it stir at her boots and try to hold her back, clinging to her legs, soaking the leather, she can spare it no more than a few thoughts. She's too irritated at the by-play between Dorian — quicksilver bright, with intelligent eyes that stare out at the ruins of their world — and this darkened, rough-hewn imitation of the Inquisition's Commander.

According to Cullen, not only are Blackwall and Solas within the castle walls, but Leliana had been taken captive some six months prior. The news is at once a relief — at least they truly won't be fighting their way through this castle alone — but also disheartening. She doesn't want to imagine what they must have suffered.

Hel sloshes through water almost up to her knees and prays to a god who has proven absent that they aren't so far gone to the lyrium as Cullen is.

Even if he's been infected by the lyrium, he seems to know his own mind, at least to an extent. The Commander she'd known before had been kind toher, polite, despite her status as a mage, and he hadn't been immediately suspicious of Dorian when he'd barged into the War Room in the Chantry. This sudden mistrust and hatred aimed his way, simply for being a Tevinter mage, seems new and entirely unlike the man she thought she was coming to know. But even if he has become more brutal, she can't deny he knows his way around the dungeons. He takes its twists and turns and lyrium-blocked passages in stride.

And he somehow seems to realize that she hates the water, or perhaps the stuff is as foul as she bethought it. Twice, he slows his step, pointing with a hand or jerking his chin for them to carry on, and when they do, he moves Hel out of the way of a downpour. The first time, he grabs her by the upper arm, closing his hand around her in a grip that surely leaves marks.

When she looks down, she sees that his nails are too long, too sharp, for his fingers to be unaffected. She sees no crust of lyrium, but in the cracks around his cuticles, red glitters like mica in stone.

They arrive at some sort of indoor plaza, created from a grated floor. And now that she's within the lower levels of the castle, she can see one of the ways it survives assault: the floor works on a chain-and-pulley system. At any point the castle guard decide the people in the room are an invading force, they can use the pulleys to lift the floor, dumping everyone into a chasm that must be endless.

There are guards here already, three of them.

Cullen draws his sword; its hilt rattles horribly in his grasp. Dorian flings about walls of fire, and Heloise fills the air with the tooth-buzzing, shatterglass noise of lightning.

She forces the lightning to arc from one man, whose body twitches and jerks while his teeth chatter, to the next. Ahead of her, Cullen charges into the fray, and she can't help but watch as he moves. He's as quick and deadly as he'd been atop the mountain, outside the Temple of Sacred Ashes, and even with the faint gleam of red in the white skin of his back, his movements are beautiful.

He takes the head off her second target, heedless of the crackling lightning that tries to snap his way. He extends a hand, and her spell falls silent before it can touch him. Without missing a beat, he whirls and puts his sword through the stomach of her first victim, who hadn't yet caught his breath.

Heloise extends a hand of her own, and freezes the third man in place. Dorian follows up with a fire glyph just ahead of him, and then Cullen rams one thick, powerful shoulder into the guard's back. The guard topples forward, into the glyph.

Cullen kicks what remains of the corpse off the grated walk, planting a boot in its ribcage. The body rolls, but not swiftly enough, and he kicks again, and again, until finally the poor man is gone, over the edge and into the chasm below. Hel shudders at the thought of pale skin striking that dark, awful water — 

But he'd been trying to kill her. She shakes herself slightly, forces her shoulders to straighten.

"Where next?" She asks.

Cullen's movements are agonizingly slow as he turns toward her. He stares at her a moment, as if seeing her for the first time all over again. She watches realization cross his face like dawn over Haven's mountains, and then turn swiftly to failure and despair.

He crosses the space between them in movements as swift, as sure, as if he were coming to kill her, but as he draws near, he takes her face reverently in one hand. His skin is hot, burning hot, but he touches her so gently with his fingertips that it almost doesn't hurt.

"Herald," he breathes. "Did I let one of them by?"

It takes her a moment to realize he's reacting to some injury on her face. She might have a bruise; she doesn't even begin or pretend to know. The fight in the lower cells hadn't seemed important at the time, since it hadn't broken bones or robbed her of mana.

"No," she says. "This is from earlier."

Slightly ahead of them, Dorian has turned to face her, and is staring at them with an air of mild horror. There's amusement there, too, she thinks, if she's reading the tilt of his brow right. It is, she supposes, entertaining from the outside.

Cullen releases her abruptly, pulling away, and she breathes out her relief as the painful, tingling warmth recedes.

"Where next?" She asks again.

Cullen shakes for a moment, before he looks back at her. His gaze moves to her face again, and for a moment she sees the sort of flat, naked lust that had frightened her, when she'd been trapped in the Circle at Ostwick. Templars hadn't been the only men to wear it — she'd seen it on her share of mages — but they'd always been the most dangerous.

But all he says is, "This way," and turns right. He leads them across the grate to a door, and then down two different flights of stairs. Another wing of the prison, it would seem? She simply tries to edge away from all the standing water. 

"If red lyrium is an infection," Dorian asks as they pass an outcropping of the stuff, glowing and warm, "then why is it growing from the walls?"

Hel dodges away from it. It's even warmer than Cullen's hands had been. She could boil water on it, if she had a kettle, though it might take her a while. "Are you sure you want to know?"

Cullen doesn't respond to Dorian's question. Of course he doesn't. She almost sighs. He does, at least, stop at a door.

"Blackwall is through here," he says. He stands aside, leaves the door for Hel or Dorian to open.

Hel steps forward, resting her hands on the latch. "And Solas? Sister Leliana?"

"Sister Leliana is in the upper levels." He jerks his head, pointing with his chin at the door they'd come through. "Alexius is curious about her resistance to the Blight." Cullen says the word _curious_ with a wry, bitter anger, and Hel wonders just what's been done to her. He jerks his head again, this time toward a door set into the far wall. "Solas is another flight down."


End file.
